My wife is now selected for the first group, the first wave, as it were, of nurses being sent to help with the Haiti thing.  We still can't plan.  No one can tell us when she will go.  No one can tell us how long.  She asked specifically, "Should I be packing  to travel light, or should I be trying to assemble a couple of duffel bags full of medical supplies?"  They can't advise her about that, either.

The way it looks now, chances are about even she will be working through the US military in some way (original plans were to send her aboard the USS Comfort, but the Navy decided to stick with just their own personnel, at the last moment), or going in with her team to Santo Domingo, and staging from there on their own.

She got her invitation through her union.  She's a nurse with a master's, with decades of experience in emergency medicine, and she's been on clinics in Jamaica, Belize, and the Dominican Republic.  She is a crackerjack, as we still say, here in Maine; she is precisely the sort of level-headed trouper they want.

The limits on the Haiti effort are two: communications, firstly, and then access.  The ways in and out of Haiti under current conditions are few, and they are clogged.  The biggest clog is our own military, which has a couple of myriads of minions in there, hogging the roads, the airports, and so forth.

So we are waiting for the 'phone call.  You know, or the e-mail, whatever it happens to be.   They talked with her extensively this afternoon, but most of the information went from us to them, as you have seen. We still know little, but they have found out much about her, her character, qualities, and level of preparedness, and that has made them place her in the first row.

Wisely, in my view.  She really is all that.

We have close acquaintances and friends already on the way there.  Kristy Engel already is in Haiti right this minute.  Our Dominican Republic group worked mostly with Haitians in that country, as readers of my blog know.  Kristy is administering three clinic-sized medical groups for them.  She left already for Haiti the other day, on an expedition with 7 or 8 trucks and buses loaded with equipment, food, water, and personnel, enough to set up the three clinics and also a separate food-distribution point at another location.  Kristy doesn't administer the food thing, but we know Salvador and some of the others (Marc, Annaliese, Joaquin) who will be.

There is already a second trip planned from La Romana, using the influx of Abingdon, Mass. docs and pharmacists and nurses and techs who come that week, and thereafter a third trip, on February 2nd, using our Maine group and others.

Wish us luck!